We Want to Share Books, Music, Films With You!

La Quadrature du Net felt the urge to share works with the Members of the European Parliament and their assistants ahead of the ACTA vote, and in order to shed light on the urgency of reforming copyright. Some of these works aim at enjoyment and others at extending knowledge or enriching the public debate. All of them innovate in content, ways of distribution, economic models and relationship between authors, contributors and users. All citizens can do the same, and share pieces of digital culture with their elected representatives!

Dear Member of the European Parliament,
Dear Parliamentary assistant,
Dear Citizen,

We, citizens from the Internet, felt the urge to share with you these pieces of the digital culture we are building everyday through the free, open, neutral and therefore universal Internet.

You will find a collection of music, movies, and books dear to our heart and created with the same passion (we call it "Datalove"!) of sharing and reusing cultural works, and promoting such practices. This is the way culture is made!

We hope these works will help you understand that beyond voting NO to ACTA, it is urgent that the cultural practices enabled by digital technologies be encouraged through a deep positive reform of copyright, rather than repressed.

"Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." - Article 27.1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Books - Reform copyright

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, "Sharing" (released in 2012) offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Source : http://www.sharing-thebook.com/

In computer science, "code" typically refers to the text of a computer program (the source code). In law, "code" can refer to the texts that constitute statutory law. In his book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, explores the ways in which code in both senses can be instruments for social control, leading to his dictum that "Code is law." This book, released in 2000, is especially relevant to understand how technical regulation of the Internet can lead to undermining rights and freedoms online.

"The Future of Ideas" is a continuation of his previous book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which is about how computer programs can restrict freedom of ideas in cyberspace. While copyright helps artists get rewarded for their work, Lessig warns that a copyright regime that is too strict and grants copyright for too long a period of time (e.g. the current US legal climate) can destroy innovation, as the future always builds on the past. Lessig also discusses recent movements by corporate interests to promote longer and tighter protection of intellectual property in three layers: the code layer, the content layer, and the physical layer.

In "Free Culture", Lessig masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.. Free Culture was released in 2005 and remains a landmark piece for the copyright reform movement.

In "Remix" (released in 2008) Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and a respected voice in what he deems the "copyright wars", describes the disjuncture between the availability and relative simplicity of remix technologies and copyright law. Lessig insists that copyright law as it stands now is antiquated for digital media since every "time you use a creative work in a digital context, the technology is making a copy". Thus, amateur use and appropriation of digital technology is under unprecedented control that previously extended only to professional use.

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this ground-breaking book released in 2006. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.

The Free Culture Forum was first organised as an international encounter on free culture and free knowledge that took place in Barcelona from October 30th to November 1st 2009. During the Forum more than a hundred organisations and individuals from all continents active in free culture worked together to produce a common declaration, or charter. The Forum ended up with a first version of the "Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge". The present document is the interpretation of the Charter from the perspective of Free Knowledge. Note that this is work in progress.

We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document, first released in 2010, is to promote innovative strategies to defend and extend the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably. This "How-To" is addressed to policy reformers, citizens and free/libre culture activists to provide them practical tools to actively operate this change.

In its answer to a EU Commission's consultation on "creative content", La Quadrature calls on the EU to reconsider the EU's coercive and repressive copyright policies, while encouraging it to match words to deeds by fostering the rights of the public in the digital creative ecosystem. The document gives a hint of what should be done to start reforming copyright: repeal liberty-killer repressive schemes and Internet filtering; ban techincal restriction measures; shorten copyright terms; make the existing exceptions to copyright mandatory EU-wide; create new exceptions for not-for-profit sharing and re-use of cultural works, and give room to the development of new funding models

Movies

"RiP!: A Remix Manifesto" is a 2008 open source documentary film about "the changing concept of copyright" directed by Brett Gaylor.
Created over a period of six years, the documentary film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to the Open Source Cinema website, helping to create the "world's first open source documentary" as Gaylor put it. The project's working title was Basement Tapes, (referring to the album of the same name) but it was renamed RiP!: A Remix Manifesto prior to theatrical release. Gaylor encourages more people to create their own remixes from this movie, using media available from the Open Source Cinema website, or other websites like YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, or MySpace.

"Steal This Film" is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol. Part One, shot in Sweden and released in August 2006, combines accounts from prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture (The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån, and the Pirate Party) with found material, propaganda-like slogans and Vox Pops.

Nina Paley is an award-winning independent cartoonist and animator for her "Sita sings the blues" video. "Copying is not Theft", released in 2009, advocates to reconsider the act of copying in a new light, stressing the importance of copying for creativity, innovation and free speech.

"Star Wars Uncut" is a 2010 fan film remake of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. It is a shot-for-shot recreation of the "Special Edition" version of the film made from 473 fifteen-second segments created and submitted from a variety of participants. The full film was made available on the Internet in August 2010 and can be watched for free. The project was conceived by Casey Pugh, a Web developer who was 25 at the time of the release.

"Can I Get An Amen?" is a 2004 audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, "the Amen Break". It begins with the pop track "Amen Brother" by 60's soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a 'B' side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that 'information wants to be free'- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

"Everyring Is A Remix" is a documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation. Kirby Ferguson explores how innovations emerge, arguing that everything is a remix, and that all original material builds of remixes and previously existing material. Throughout the documentary, with examples borrowed from fields of music, movies, and development of new technologies, Kirby Ferguson is questionning the utility of copyright laws.

"Good Copy Bad Copy, A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture", is a documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers, artists and filesharing service providers.
A central point of the documentary is the thesis that "creativity itself is on the line" and that a balance needs to be struck, or that there is a conflict, between protecting the right of those who own intellectual property and the rights of future generations to create.

Music

"The Grey Album" is a mashup album by Danger Mouse, released in 2004. It uses an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album and couples it with instrumentals created from a multitude of unauthorized samples from The Beatles' LP The Beatles (more commonly known as The White Album). The Grey Album gained notoriety due to the response by EMI in attempting to halt its distribution, despite the fact that both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney said they felt fine with the project.

This is Mash-up mastermind Girl Talk's (real name: Gregg Gillis)'s fourth sample-heavy album. This 12-track compilation features nearly 400 samples of artists from Beck to the Beastie Boys, Radiohead to Portishead, the Arcade Fire to Alicia Key. "All Day", released in 2010, consists entirely of musical samples from other artists’ songs, often bringing together completely different musical genres side by side in harmony.

"Feed the Animals" was released on Illegal Art in 2008. It is composed almost entirely of sample taken from other artists' songs, plus minor original instrumentation by Girl Talk. Gillis stated that the album was created as one long piece of music and then subsequently broken into individual songs

Girl Talk detonates the notions of mash-up on his third album, the violently joyous "Night Ripper", released in 2006. Rather than squeeze two songs that sorta make sense together into a small box, Gillis crams six or eight or 14 or 20 songs into frenetic rows, slicing fragments off 1980s pop, Dirty South rap, booty bass, and grunge, among countless other genres. Then he pieces together the voracious music fan's dream: a hulking hyper-mix designed to make you dance, wear out predictable ideas, and defy hopeless record-reviewing (Source: Pitchfork).

Steinski’s "Rough Mix" (released in 2011) bursts with songs and artists discussed within Kembrew McLeod & Peter DiCola’s book "Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling" (published in April 2011 by Duke University Press). It features hundreds of songs and samples mashed together by Steinski, the sonic cut-and-paste artist best known for a hugely influential series of early-1980s twelve-inch singles popularly known as “The Lessons.” Peppered throughout the mix are soundbites from McLeod’s co-produced documentary Copyright Criminals